The subject matter of the present application relates to microelectronic packages and assemblies incorporating microelectronic packages.
Semiconductor chips are commonly provided as individual, prepackaged units. A standard chip has a flat, rectangular body with a large front face having contacts connected to the internal circuitry of the chip. Each individual chip typically is contained in a package having external terminals which, in turn, are electrically connected to a circuit panel such as a printed circuit board and which connects the contacts of the chip to conductors of the circuit panel. In many conventional designs, the chip package occupies an area of the circuit panel considerably larger than the area of the chip itself. As used in this disclosure with reference to a flat chip having a front face, the “area of the chip” should be understood as referring to the area of the front face.
Microelectronic packages may be fabricated at the wafer level; that is, the enclosure, terminations and other features that constitute the package, are fabricated while the chips, or die, are still in a wafer form. After the die have been formed, the wafer is subject to a number of additional process steps to form the package structure on the wafer, and the wafer is then diced to free the individually packaged die. Wafer level processing may be a preferred fabrication method because it may provide a cost savings advantage, and because the footprint of each die package may be made identical, or nearly identical, to the size of the die itself, resulting in very efficient utilization of area on the printed circuit board to which the packaged die is attached. A die packaged in this manner is commonly referred to as wafer-level chip scale package or wafer-level chip sized package (WLCSP).
In order to save additional space on the substrate to which a packaged die is mounted, multiple chips may be combined in a single package by vertically stacking them. Each die in the stack must typically provide an electrical connection mechanism to either one or more other die in the stack, or to the substrate on which the stack is mounted, or to both. This allows the vertically stacked multiple die package to occupy a surface area on a substrate that is less than the total surface area of all the chips in the package added together. Such arrangements have, however, required the chips to be offset at least somewhat to provide access to the contacts of the upper chips for electrical connection thereto, as the routing for all of the multiple chips is done along the same surface of the package. This can also lead to complicated routing and for different paths to externally-connected logic between chips of the same package.
In light of the foregoing, certain improvements in multi-chip microelectronic packages can be made in order to improve electrical performance, particularly in assemblies which include such packages interconnected with one another or other packages.